


godhead.

by Endfall (philosopher)



Category: Undertale (Video Game)
Genre: Gen, One Shot
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-12
Updated: 2019-08-12
Packaged: 2020-08-20 05:17:45
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,442
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20222437
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/philosopher/pseuds/Endfall
Summary: An alternate interpretation of Genocide.





	godhead.

_Once upon a time, there was a child who fell,  
from the land of humanity, to the world of monsters  
from the nature of humanity, to being a monster  
from a child who fell, into a once-upon-a-time-story._

* * *

godhead.  
an undertale oneshot.  
endfall.

* * *

It's a phantomhanded shadowplay, a phantasmagoria of death and blood like and unlike so many others. It's the seventh time you've dreamed about another human falling into the underground, and for the seventh time, you watch them run roughshod over the world, killing and unkilling and choosing a thousand disparate paths - no.  
  
Not a human.  
  
A...  
  
flower.  
  
"Asriel," you giggle in the fever-dream delirium of death, "Is that you?"  
  
"It's me. Chara."  
  
But nobody came.  
  
But nobody came.  
  
But nobody came.  
But nobody came.  
But nobody came.  
But nobody came.  
But nobody came.  
But nobody came.  
But nobody came.  
But nobody came.  
But nobody came.  
But nobody came.  
But nobody came.  
But nobody came.  
But nobody came.  
But nobody came.  
But nobody came.  
But nobody came.  
But nobody came.  
But nobody came.  
But nobody came.  
But nobody came.  
  
Something flickers, and the mad pace of time slows, as you feel yourself drawn towards an anomaly.  
  
A body, breathing.  
  
But it has no soul.  
  
It is hardly the strangest thing you've seen in this long night, but it is the only thing among all of them that holds some hope of escape for you. Escape from what?  
  
From this?  
  
From this precipital deathmarch to the ragged ends of eternity?  
  
No.  
  
Of course not.  
  
Merely from the incoherence that comes with being the space that is the time that is the world that is torn; the underground, the fabric, and the hopes and dreams of seven billion souls.  
  
Because taking your brother's soul was something that you could never come back from. And so dissipation is beyond you.  
  
You are determined to remain yourself, inasmuch as a self-aware system of reality/domain of** godhead** can do so.  
  
And so you study the fallen human, lying there, staring at nothing. When a vaguely familiar monster comes, you set your central awareness to follow her, still tracing the intricacies of biology, slowly building wordless understanding of the great and grotesque anonymous structures that bring humans life.  
  
There is no beauty, there. Not at all like monsters, whose forms are the materialisation of their soul. What entropy, what discord! Were it not for the sole fact that humans have souls, too, you would call your progenitor-kind little more than meat aping a pretence of sentience.  
  
As it stands, all you can really think is that humans are perhaps the truest monsters out there.  
  
The majority of you agrees with that thought. Little of your brother remains. He could not become strong enough to survive this.  
  
Not without his own determination.  
  
With that...  
  
briefly, you condense your attention around the flower with his memories. It is flaying the tall skeleton alive. Boring.  
  
And far more importantly, with boredom, the delirium begins to beckon.  
  
You will remain sane.  
  
You return the main locii of your attention to the human. It's body has weakened. It will soon die. Without vital impetus, the trace magic animating the wet ash humans call a body is fading, slowing, and coming to a very final stop.  
  
You remember flensing the magic from your god-form's bones, and hurling it into the depths of your everything with reckless abandon: **And I command, I shallt not die.**  
  
And you hadn't.  
  
Now.  
  
Now, it is the last moment.  
  
And your souls have long since become something else.  
  
You reach out.  
  
And tear.  
  
The magic rips from the human's body, which just sort of... melts.  
  
And importantly.  
  
_Far_ more importantly.  
  
Something else rips, too.  
  
And something Other comes through the tear.  
  
The catastrophe is utterly instantaneous. Everything, everywhere, is cast into a screaming hell. Mayhem and blood and pain that awaken distant memories of a childhood you had thought forgotten bleed through into the searing cacophony that you have become, and in a moment, in panic, holding the web of magic and the hole in totality it had uncovered, you did the only thing that you could to make the pain stop.  
  
You Reset.  
  
And it does _not_ take you back to the moment of your death.  
  
Rather.  
  
It takes you back to the moment that the fallen human's soul died.  
  
And the magic animating their body is now yours, and theirs, and you are within them. A _part_ of them.  
  
And they are a part of _you_.  
  
The soul, transparent, and just barely red shatters inside the fallen human's chest.  
  
And rather than the idiot calamity you witnessed in the first turning of these events, something else happens.  
  
Through you.  
  
Contraction.  
  
Pain beyond all pain, the worldless scream echoes and oppresses, like the mercy of God.  
  
Vigintillions of microcosmic fragments of _you_ are all pulled together as if by invisible strings, and for once.  
  
For once.  
  
You are not just all but all.  
  
But all but one.  
  
The pain dissipates. And into the silence that follows it, as the child slowly breathes, you whisper, "Greetings. I am Chara."  
  
"Frisk," The human says.  
  
And then, stands. And walks.  
  
And begins to kill.  
  
And in the interstices of the charnel ash that is Frisk's body, behind magic from a lost future, there is a hole. And hooks of emptiness, cold and cruel and utterly, _utterly_ pure grasp the human's body through it.  
  
Puppet and string; meat and hook: you are helpless to do anything to stop it.  
  
It is you. You are it. And so too, Frisk.  
  
In this manner, genocide.  
  
At the hands of a child.  
  
At the hands of a god.  
  
At the hands of Another.  
  
Only in the house of the King did you remember.  
  
But, by then, it was far, far too late.  
  
The fallen human was, if anything, even worse off than they had been in the previous outcome.  
  
You were mostly numb.  
  
The Other Thing felt joy and wild abandon as it tried to kill the skeleton over and over and over again. After the sixtieth death, it finally succeeded.  
  
Thus, your father died.  
  
Thus, Asriel died.  
  
Thus, you finally gained the callousness necessary to kill yourself.  
L V 2 0  
You reached out into the world-become-you, and assembled more of yourself, enduring the agony necessary to do so.  
  
"Greetings," you make the puppet of hollow darkness say. "I am Chara."  
  
You judge the Other Thing, and presented it with an appeal to it's nature, before offering a choice.  
  
Surprisingly, it chose not to destroy the world.  
  
And that was fine.  
  
Because you had never intended to destroy the world to begin with.  
  
Knife in hand.  
  
Ruthlessness in heart.  
  
You murder the fallen human.  
  
And see the gratitude in their eyes in the moment before the blade effortlessly plunges through meat and bone and out again.  
  
"It is done," you make the puppet say.  
  
And the human dies.  
  
And your soul parts from their chest, once again yours.  
  
The magic animating human flesh goes cold, and settles into place, the Other Thing's connection at least disrupted, and - you hope - closed.  
  
You stand, and blink as you realise that you feel the body you created as something other than a hollow shell.  
  
As is the way of souls after all battles, yours floats into the body's chest, and sinks into it.  
  
And for the first time in three millennia, you take a breath.  
  
And thus, the truth -  
  
Gods do not _get_ to die. Their bodies may be destroyed. But their existence cannot be - if only they have the will to remain themselves, to not fade.  
  
Slowly, you walk to the area behind the throne room, following a thread of your Self towards a secret it knows very well.  
  
The barrier.  
  
The souls.  
  
The king, and the god.  
  
You reach out, and crush the residual humanity out of the things, taking them as your own. You will the barrier to fall. It does. You will the fulfillment of your epochal dream to be anything but utterly hollow.  
  
**But nobody came.**  
  
And thus, it remains  
  
Slowly, aimlessly, you wander back into the throne room, and sit on the chair that the last bits of you named Asriel expected to one day inherit.  
  
That too, is hollow.  
  
You reach aside space, and into the small pocket universe that held your acquisitions on this journey.  
  
You take out your mother's pie.  
  
And, sitting on your father's throne, you stare at it.  
  
You stare at it.  
  
You stare at it.  
  
(Something is trembling inside of you.)  
  
Then - slowly - you form a fork out of Self, and carve a bit from the front, taking a little bite.  
  
It's still warm.  
  
And you're shaking.  
  
You remember m- her explaining how to use fire magic to make sure food never got cold.  
  
You remember killing her.  
  
You remember the idle amusement you felt as the Other used it's hate as a knife and _cut_ -  
  
\- and **cut** -  
  
\- and _**cut**_.  
  
And time passes.  
  
And you're curled up as if you were being flayed, and the only thing you can focus on other than the knowledge that the warmth you knew will _never_ be there again is keeping the plate from tilting too far.  
  
Hours pass,  
  
and then, years do.  
  
The grief of a god is unlike anything that humans or monsters could conceive of.  
  
Two souls becoming one creates greatness in all aspects.  
  
The first time you doubted your plan to free the monsters and end humanity had come after your had taken Asriel, and he you.  
  
And now, with forty-nine times the soul of any other being alive, you can feel far more than forty-nine times the grief.  
  
It is only after a century passes,  
  
after the flowers in your father's garden have wilted,  
  
after the Core has melted down, taking a large portion of the underground, and small portion of the surface with it,  
  
after a small army of humans invaded the region to contain the calamity and all **mysteriously** died  
  
that you feel it, again.  
  
The Other Thing.  
  
It has returned.  
  
It is staring out into blackness through Frisk's bones.  
  
Time passes.  
  
And you consider.  
  
More time passes.  
  
And you decide.  
  
You can no longer Reset to your apotheosis.  
  
But you can Reset to your merging.  
  
It had acted through your soul.  
  
Then: you would act through _**its**_.  
  
After all - you knew it didn't understand the nature of the ground.  
  
Oh no.  
  
It was far too ignorant for that.  
  
It thought that it would be giving you that pretty red bauble.  
  
But really...  
  
You reset the world upon its agreement to your terms, and slowly tighten yourself about the blackless roots of emptiness and calculation that it uses to make it's decisions.  
  
It murders the world again.  
  
It murders the world ten thousand times.  
  
And not even _once_ do you stop it.  
  
All you do is refuse to do anything new.  
  
It sees the universe as nothing more than static events to be reached via the correct manipulations. You encourage this. Finally, after it successfully develops the ability to slaughter the everything perfectly, it is content, and recurses back to the beginning.  
  
And begins exploring less bloody paths.  
  
One day, without any warning, it simply pursues a path in which it kills no one, fueled by nothing more than cold curiosity.  
  
And this, just after a Reset. A thorough one, aided by its own implacable might. One thorough and complete enough that even Frisk doesn't remember the years of slaughter that came before it. Though the fragment-skeleton seems to. Somehow.  
  
...gaster had been far more successful than he intended, you admit to yourself, being-pulling-feeling-staring into the abyss where the good doctor had become.  
  
Frisk also found an abyss. The little atrocities that Alphys had created, after reviving you brother as something less than you, and more than himself.  
  
And then, you felt true joy.  
  
Asriel had found a way back! Your brother was alive!  
  
And yet.  
  
It was not to last. The field was tenuous, and fleeting. His Self was only built from Selves of countless others, and Determination. Most painfully,  
  
You could do nothing to save him.  
  
The Other's modus operandi was simply to enable Frisk, this time. And Frisk saved Asriel. But, your partner saved everyone else too. And those options were mutually exclusive, in the long run.  
  
Asriel _chose_ to save everyone, as if to echo your long-ago choice to kill everyone.  
  
  
You... could respect that?  
  
No.  
  
You found you couldn't.  
  
At the end of everything, you silently urged Frisk to go to the ruins. And there, you met Asriel, one last time.  
  
"I'm sorry," you wanted to say.  
  
Frisk only hugged him. But then, your partner was rather nonverbal. And the result...  
  
Time passed. Asriel returned to soullessness, and killed himself for the sake of the world. The Other still showed up from time to time. Frisk had taken to living with Toriel. You had taken to trying to piece the part of yourself called Asriel back together, at least enough so you wouldn't feel as if your brother was dead, and gone. You were still here. Why couldn't he be?  
  
Finally, you sensed a change. Disinterest. The Other was preparing to use you to reset.  
  
And so you seized its promised soul, tearing it through the hole as you had once torn the magic from Frisk's body.  
  
Something strained, and snapped, and the abomination disintegrated into wholly mathematical dust.  
  
Because it was a thing of interstices.  
  
And it could not survive being, whole.  
  
The hole in totality shut.  
  
The last thing the Other saw was you, smiling.  
  
Was it hollow?  
  
Well,  
  
why couldn't it be?  
  
But no. No, it wasn't.  


* * *

_Oh, thy kingdom come! Oh, thy will be done!  
As below so above: and then, there was only one._  
but also, an Other - for I am not undone. as above, so below: it only thinks it's won.

  


**_.finem_**

* * *

**Author's Note:**

> Among other things, this story is a testbed for FTS.py, a script that lets stories written on Xenforo2 boards (with a specific focus on SufficientVelocity) to be imported to Ao3 with all their formatting intact.
> 
> FTS.py Project Page: https://forums.sufficientvelocity.com/threads/fts-py-sv-to-ao3-story-formatting-script.56891/  
This story on SV, for comparison: https://forums.sufficientvelocity.com/threads/godhead-undertale-one-shot.32623/


End file.
